Weber, Rationalisation and Western Industrialisation

Abstract

This chapter will focus attention on Max Weber’s treatment of the development of modern industrial society in Western Europe. Weber’s treatment of rationality and the increasing rationalisation of the everyday world lies at the centre of his analysis of the development of industrial capitalism, which has been considered by many sociologists to constitute an alternative explanation to that advanced by Marx. Marx stresses the centrality of ownership of property and the way this is reflected in the relations of production, with the wage labourer selling his labour power to the bourgeois owner of capital. This opposition to Marx is an over-simplification of Weber’s position and in this chapter it should become clear that on many issues Marx and Weber agreed. None the less part of Weber’s importance is that his ideas have influenced the growth of theories of industrial development, especially those theories which have attributed only minor importance to the distribution of ownership of property. Weber’s scepticism about the possibilities of socialism reversing the tendencies within industrialism, which he thought might form an ‘iron cage’ for the individual, made Weber’s thought an ideologically compatible starting point for many Western sociologists, certainly up to the 1970s.